What Full-Time HYROX Training Actually Involves

Charlie Botterill saved six months of living costs before he quit his job to train full-time. That’s not the detail most people focus on when they hear the story of a 24-year-old going all-in on HYROX. But it’s the detail that made everything else possible.

Going full-time on a sport is not a decision made in a moment of inspiration. It’s a plan. And most of what determines whether it works happens in the months after the decision, not at the point of making it.

What 20+ hours of training per week actually looks like

Charlie’s training weeks run to roughly 23 hours. That is a job in terms of time commitment. But the common image of full-time training, grinding through hard sessions from morning to evening, isn’t what those hours look like.

The majority is low-intensity aerobic work. Long rides, time on the StairMaster, elliptical sessions that build the aerobic base without the impact stress of daily running. Using low-impact machines for volume means accumulating a high aerobic load while managing injury risk across a long season. It’s not glamorous training. It’s the foundation.

The hard sessions sit on top of that. Threshold running. HYROX-specific station work. Targeted strength work focused on the posterior chain and the movements the sport demands. Those sessions are a smaller proportion of total hours than most people expect.

Around the training sits recovery: sleep, food preparation, soft tissue work. At 23 hours of weekly training, recovery is not optional maintenance. It determines what the next session produces. Managing it with the same attention as the sessions themselves is part of what distinguishes sustainable full-time training from burning through yourself in six months.

The financial reality

Prize money in HYROX is limited. For most athletes, even at Elite 15 level, sponsorship covers kit and product rather than income. Building other revenue, through coaching, content, or brand partnerships, is part of the picture for anyone planning to sustain this beyond a single season.

Charlie was direct about this before making the leap, which is why the six months of savings mattered. Financial stress forces bad decisions. Training decisions made from a position of financial pressure, rushing back from injury to make a race, taking on too many commitments to generate income, losing the structure that makes training work, compromise everything downstream.

Going in with a financial runway means decisions can come from the training plan, not from what pays.

The mental demands

Charlie has spoken publicly about managing his mental health alongside high training load. The relevant point is structural: routine helps. A fixed schedule, clear training objectives, and a sense of purpose in the day create the stability that high training volume requires over months, not just weeks.

Full-time training removes the external structure that most people’s days are built around. No manager. No commute. No meeting schedule. The athletes who sustain it well create their own structure deliberately. Without it, days blur, recovery suffers, and the training that was supposed to be the point becomes hard to execute consistently.

Removing external pressure doesn’t make things easier. It changes which pressure is most present. The doubt, the comparison with other athletes, the question of whether the results will justify the sacrifice. Those don’t disappear. They become the daily mental environment rather than background noise.

What typically breaks athletes who try this

Underestimating the financial pressure and making decisions from financial stress rather than from the training plan. Running through savings faster than expected and having to compromise the structure that made going full-time worthwhile in the first place.

Confusing freedom with flexibility and letting structure slip. Training becomes reactive rather than planned. Quality drops. The results that were supposed to build don’t come as fast as expected, and without the external commitment of a job to give the days shape, it’s easy to drift.

Expecting the hard things to stop being hard. The Ski Erg is still at 6am. The threshold session is still brutal. The off days are still off days. Going full-time on a sport doesn’t change what the training requires. It just removes the other competing demands, which means the training has to be enough.

The principles here apply beyond full-time training. Schedule, data, recovery, structure. Treating HYROX seriously at any level means building those habits. The athletes who do are the ones who improve consistently, regardless of whether they’ve quit their job to do it.

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